Tuesday, March 08, 2011

I enjoyed listening to the Jason Calacanis interview with Blair Harrison of Frequency on This Week in Startups.

Frequency is a very good idea and product. For me, the key feature is "Auto Scan", which Frequency describes as:

Auto Scan mode is the same as "Autoscan" on a car stereo.

In this mode, Frequency will play you a 15 second excerpt of each video in the feed you're tuned to before automatically advancing to the next clip. It's the fastest, simplest way to quickly watch a series of videos to find one you want to watch in its entirety, without having to click around endlessly.

However, it was not quite working as I expected.

For example, I searched for my current favorite thing - "khan academy". This is the page I got back:

Unfortunately, the Topics are not related to the Khan Academy. Some of the clips are, and it would be nice to have Auto Scan on the clips in the search results.

Interestingly, when I clicked on the PBS clip about the khan academy, I got this page:

This page does have a khan academy Topic, and I can then do Auto Scan, but it would be good to see the topic directly on the Search Page. (either that, or my mental model of how Frequency works is missing something)